Other stuff

Monday, 23 January 2012

Ready steady don't go

GURNELL LEISURE CENTRE

Ruislip Road, East Ealing

London W13 0AL

020 8998 3241

Added bonus: I’m struggling
with this category.

Negative: Mould.

Gurnell. It’s hard to say that word with a jaunty bounce. I wonder if the Mr and Ms Gurnells of the world fold
into a depressed slump every time they introduce themselves. It suits the day;
just off the A40 I spot the low grey building perfectly matching a low grey
sky. I came looking for a moan and then I found a moan: why do I have to pay to
park my car here? That’s crap and money-grabbing. There’s a crow watching me as
I push coins into the machine. It laughs. Caws. I resist the urge to throw
something at it, but more because I’m shit at throwing.

The changing rooms are a
large open space, benches, few cubicles. Bland and neat, basic utilitarian over
fashionable, which is fine because they are very
clean – the white tiles almost twinkle, a good sign for standards in the water,
I think. A couple of women changing
and chatting forward-remind me of me and swimming friend Jackie in about
20 (probably 10, if I’m honest) years. Watching them, I’m quite heartened. That
looks OK, I think, being 20 (10) years older…

Today I have a mission.
Today, I want to practice the ‘art of swimming’ I learnt earlier in the week.* I wonder if people think that because I write about swimming I'm a good swimmer? It's not so. Normally, my swimming style is as close to art as ... Tracy Emin's second cousin-once-removed is. No longer. Now I'm the swimming version of Tracy Emin. (Yep - rude and self-obsessed, and people often ask - is it really swimming?) I’m chanting the Art of Swimming mantra I walk through: ‘ready, steady, go’, and I'm glad it's not something rude. If there had been no-one there, I’d have
practiced my arms on land, but I’m not a show-off, so I did some visualising instead. I quite like a bit of visualising. I do it in cold water,
visualising a fire in my belly.
Now, I’m visualising beautiful arty arms and legs propelling me through
the water like a torpedo.

The pool area is
massive, and nicely apportioned into three separate pools: teaching, shallow
and deep. I thought I was coming to a 50m pool (which I love) but today the
boom was up, and the deep bit, laned for swimming, was only about 25m (and
deep, obviously). I take a look
around. Christ on a stick, it ain’t pretty. You know corrugated cardboard? The
way you can force it into wave shapes? That’s what the ceiling looks like, same
colour, a horrible browny beige, and texture. (I saw a whole art exhibition made from that stuff, last summer. Loads and loads of it, curling into mazes. It was less interesting than it sounds.) One wall by the deep pool is the same material, bowed back as if we’re on the outside of a tunnel, with, nice
touch, mould crawling up it. Great clumps of black mould flowering slowly up
the wall – you can even see it on the photo above! How shit is that! It’s enough to make me want to get my
marigolds on and get scrubbing. (It’s not. Somebody should be paid to clean it.
If GLL are looking for someone, I can recommend the person who cleans their
changing rooms.) On another wall a long line of kayaks are propped up, like an
instillation, putting some vibrant plastic colours into a dirty-colour space. Little bits of light float
in through the condensation on the windows. It’s one of those condensation
days.

I get in. Lane MAYHEM. A
big group of men in the water, dotted all over the place REGARDLESS OF SPEED OR
ABILITY. I despair, silently, then
tick myself off for my own intolerance. Fuck it’s tiresome being me, constantly
trying to moderate my natural mean-spiritedness, I can’t imagine why you’re all
still reading. In the far lane, there are three women swimming and I head there. I can’t see a clock, so I decide to swim for as long as that woman who got in just ahead of me. I say I can’t see
a clock. I can’t see bloody anything. The water is so murky and milk-churny and
hot, I feel like giving up before I’ve started. I can’t do that, I have a
stroke to practice. Ready steady go.

This is a really tricky
swim. The lanes are narrow, everyone’s speed is erratic, the water is really
churned up and busy. That woman I’m following keeps swimming so I keep
swimming. It’s impossible to see. I can’t slow down, there’s someone right
behind me, I can’t speed up, the kick-bubbles ahead are keeping me at bay and on track. At the end of each
lane there’s no rail or grip, so you either grab the slippery boom, or touch and push
awkwardly off again. That woman keeps swimming so I keep swimming. I’m hot, and
bothered. I try a bit of ‘ready
steady’, I really want to practice, but I’ve got too much other intrusions from
this pool on my mind, and I’m too slow - I need to be slow to get it right
before I (theoretically) speed up, but I’m holding up the line. I do my kick
practice instead – down, down, I mentally chant. I think: this pool would be OK if the boom was down, so it
was at the full 50 m. And if the water was clear and clean and cooler. And the mould was sluiced off. Oh,
and the walls weren’t that horrible grubby beige. That woman keeps swimming, and I visualise a torpedo failing
to go off, so follow another woman instead, one who is just
getting out.

I shower (they’re OK)
and change. The mirrors are excellent for eyebrow plucking. Bring tweezers.

As I leave, I walk
through a wide gate, marked as a wheelchair exit, then I approach an automatic
door, it opens. Hmmm, I think, good disabled access, and when it proclaims
itself like this, I mentally give it a tick. And then I hit the outer doors,
almost literally. They need two hands to shove open, the bottom scratching
along the ground. All I do is sigh, it's not a personal inconvenience but I wonder how frustrating that is for a
wheelchair user. They get some of it right, there’s a ramp up, but then, you’re
faced with doors that are dead tough to open manually.

I’m on the way to see my
mum. Next time I’m doing this journey, I’ll stop off at Uxbridge Lido instead,
infinitely better. Sorry, Gurnell, but nominative determinism works, you are
like you sound. I hit the A40 again, in a slump.

*The Art of Swimming is
great; I did a day-long front
crawl workshop, first time I’ve ever really had a proper front crawl lesson. I
really recommend it for deconstructing your stroke along Alexander technique
lines, whatever ability you are. They are here.